Yesterday I posted about Cisco UCS supporting RDMA (SMB Direct) with firmware version 2.2(4b)B. Walter Dey, former Cisco Distinguished Engineer at Cisco informed me not only about the RDMA feature he also showed me that Cisco UCS now supports Consistent Device Naming which was introduced with Windows Server 2012. Consistent Device Naming (CDN) allows Ethernet interfaces to be named in a consistent manner. This makes Ethernet interface names more persistent when adapter or other configuration changes are made. To use CDN in Cisco UCS you need to run firmware version 2.2(4b)B. This will help to make it a lot easier to identify network interfaces used with Windows Server 2012 R2 and Hyper-V.

RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) allows direct memory access over an Ethernet network. RoCE is a link layer protocol, and hence, it allows communication between any two hosts in the same Ethernet broadcast domain. RoCE delivers superior performance compared to traditional network socket implementations because of lower latency, lower CPU utilization and higher utilization of network bandwidth. Windows Server 2012 and later versions use RDMA for accelerating and improving the performance of SMB file sharing traffic and Live Migration. If you need to know more about RDMA or SMB Direct checkout my blog post: Hyper-V over SMB: SMB Direct

As I already mentioned I did several Hyper-V and Microsoft Windows Server projects with Cisco UCS. With Cisco UCS you can now configure stateless offloads for NVGRE traffic which is needed for Hyper-V Network Virtualization.

At the Worldwide Partner Conference 2014 Cisco and Microsoft announced a multi-year sales and go-to-market agreement designed to modernize data centers through the delivery and acceleration of integrated solutions. This will focus on bringing a deeper integration between the datacenter technologies of both companies. This includes Cisco UCS and Nexus products as well as Microsoft’s CloudOS solutions based Windows Server, Hyper-V, System Center, SQL Server and Microsoft Azure.

Highlights:

Go-to-Market:

Cisco and Microsoft agree to a three-year go-to-market plan focused on transforming data centers through the delivery of integrated solutions for enterprise customers and service providers.

In year one, the companies will focus on six countries — the United States, Canada, UK, Germany, France, and Australia — with expansion to additional countries in the following years.

Cisco and Microsoft sales teams will work together on cloud and data center opportunities, including an initial program focused on the migration of Windows 2003 customers to Windows 2012 R2 on the Cisco UCS platform.

As you may know I am a Microsoft MVP and a Cisco Champion and I really like doing project with Cisco Hardware since they do a lot of integration with the Microsoft Stack especially System Center and PowerShell. In my opinion this could be a strong partnership and will make life of a lot of people a lot easier.

I feel honored to be awarded by Cisco with the Cisco Champion title. Cisco does a lot of great products and I focused on the datacenter solutions which Cisco offers with their Cisco UCS platform and the Microsoft solutions, such as the System Center Integration and the Cisco UCS PowerShell Module.

Passionate Experts, Global Champions for Change

What makes a Cisco Champion? Passion, plus a desire to share their perspectives with the community. There are Cisco Champions all over the world. They represent a variety of segments across the IT industry. And they offer their time to help others learn about Cisco and connect with Cisco in unique ways.

In addition to sharing their insights and expertise, Cisco Champions make a difference by:

In the Microsoft world PowerShell is the tool to automate everything especially in your datacenter. I already mentioned that Cisco offers some great enhancements for the Microsoft Datacenter stack. If you are using a Cisco UCS solution you can integrate System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Orchestrator and others. But Cisco does also offer a PowerShell module for the UCS called Cisco UCS PowerTool. The UCS PowerTool allows you to automate management and deployment tasks very easily via Windows PowerShell. By the way, one of the coolest features in the Cisco UCS PowerTool is the ConvertTo-UCScmdlet.

Cisco announced the UCS Power Scripting Contest

Everyone is invited to share their scripts and possibly win some prizes by entering the UCS Power Scripting Contest on the Cisco Communities. The contest will run until May 11th. A distinguished panel of judges (Jeffery Snover, Rob Willis, Don Jones, Hal Rottenberg and Thomas Maurer) along with other members of the community will select the grand prize winner from a set of five finalists.

About

My Name is Thomas Maurer. Microsoft MVP. Work as a Cloud Architect for itnetX, a consulting and engineering company located in Switzerland. I am focused on Microsoft Technologies, especially Microsoft Cloud & Datacenter solutions based Microsoft System Center, Microsoft Virtualization and Microsoft Azure.